by Ryan O'Connor

(Read the interview with actors Carlos Uriona & Matthew Glassman in the new issue of nthWORD Magazine.)

I cannot think of a more appropriate venue than the subterranean FlynnSpace at The Flynn Center for Performing Arts in Burlington Vermont to see the innovative Double Edge Theatre perform their Republic of Dreams, a bold adventure into the intensely private and vastly wild imagination of the Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, whose acute sensory perceptions of his provincial town of Drogobych compose two extraordinary short story collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Isaac Bashevis Singer says of Schulz, "He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached." With the Nazi occupation of Poland, Schulz was confined to the Jewish ghetto in Drogobych, and was then fortuitously brought under the protection of Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who commissioned Schulz to paint a mural in his home. During one of the shooting sprees in the streets of Drogobych, Landau killed the friend of a fellow officer, Karl Gunther. After completion of the mural, Landau granted Schulz passage into the Aryan sector of town, where he was shot dead by the vengeful Gunther while returning to the ghetto with a loaf of bread.

Myself a student of Schulz, I was more than intrigued by the idea of seeing his work -- which lends itself to the fantastical and the surreal with an inimitable prose style -- on stage. How do you dramatize a passage in which,

the sun-dried thistles shout, the plantains swell and boast their shameless flesh, the weeds salivate with glistening poison, and the half-wit girl, hoarse with shouting, convulsed with madness, presses her fleshy belly in an access of lust against the trunk of an elder, which groans softly under the insistent pressure of that libidinous passion, incited by the whole ghastly chorus to hideous unnatural fertility? (from the story "August")

Double Edge succeeds, not by regurgitating scenes or dialogue (in a sequential fashion) from the stories, but through a total immersion in the world of Schulz -- not only in his uncanny word images, but through his drawings, paintings, journals, and letters, through "living" expeditions to Drogobych, where they break bread with those who knew Schulz, through holding the Jewish prayer books Schulz's parents read in the Synagogue there. On stage, they become a living painting, a living story, co-authored with Schulz by the emotive imagination of the actors, interspersing some of his most exquisite passages (read his story "Spring") with their own "dream training" or intensive physio-imaginative creation as they discover and explore movement, inflections, études, mood, and even nightmares. And then the slow and quiet emergence into song. At one point the actors took up instruments during the performance --clarinet, accordion, violin -- in addition to the accompanying score. The result is as unique an experience as reading Schulz in the mind; with an immense collective imagination Double Edge conjures the visionary Schulz, themselves as characters inside his zig-zagging lines, and Schulz a character within their stunning creation Republic of Dreams.

Lead Actor and Co-Director Matthew Glassman plays the part of Josef -- or Schulz -- with a preternatural pathos, and triumphs in his wholly authentic performance of the stamp-collecting, wax-figurine transfixed lucid-dreamer, a true achievement given the incomparably rare and highly idiosyncratic disposition of the writer/artist. Glassman's intonations and choices on stage, complimented by an exquisite, ever shifting set design, resonate with the animated vigor and vibrant eloquence of Schulz's "Spring":

We are at the roots now, and at once everything becomes dark, spicy, and tangled like in the depth of a forest. There is a smell of turf and tree rot; roots wander about, entwined, full with juices that rise as if sucked up by pumps. We are on the nether side, at the lining of things, in gloom stitched with phosphorescence. (from the story "Spring")

Master Actor and Producing Director Carlos Uriona infuses the role of the Father with all the maddening verve of a true neurotic, a man who avows the family of his deeply bizarre compassion for his tailor's dummies, and captures the character with both originality and exactitude as he swoons for the unobtainable servant girl Adela, played by Jeremy Louise Eaton with a mirrored pitch of dominance found in Schulz's drawings. Hayley Brown's Bianca, Schulz's love interest, imparts a beautifully aloof, but no less deadly vocal performance. Double Edge's Republic of Dreams touches a primitive nerve, imbuing the work of one of Europe's, if not the world's, most unique literary treasures with a highly distinctive freshness -- that of pure invention. nth